WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Agendas and registers

Danny O'Brien of NTK fame has written a readable, fascinating and important piece on 'register'. By register he means a conversational intent and tone, and I think he adds a valuable 'thinking tool' to the box. The context of what he discusses is Tim O'Reilly's 'FOO Camp' last weekend, which to the paranoid mind looked just like a Scientology convention:

"Wiki-fiddlers meet in the woods!" mails Andrew to me, delighted to find so many fish in one barrel. He cc:'s a bunch of other Brits who'll no doubt share in this mass pilloring of the fruit 'n' nut end of West Coast techtopianism.

The point Danny makes is that the reaction this event has provoked, while attributable in part to jealousy from those not invited, is an expression of the loss of a mode of conversation in the online world.

in the real world, private conversations stay private. Not because everyone is sworn to secrecy, but because their expression is ephemeral and contained to an audience. There are few secrets in private conversations; but in transmitting the information contained in the conversation, the register is subtly changed. I say to a journalist, "Look, Dave, err, frankly the guy is a bit, you know. Sheesh. He's just not the sort of person that we'd ever approve of hiring.". The journalist, filtering, prints, "Sources are said to disapprove of the appointment.".

And thus a conversation in the 'private' register is transferred to the 'public' register. Danny asserts that in normal human interaction there are three registers - 'secret', 'private' and 'public' - and that the web has not, until the introduction of weblogs, had a meaningful 'private' register. One could view weblogs as an attempt to recreate that register:

"Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won't they all shut up? The answer why they won't shut up is - they're not talking to you. They're talking in the private register of ßlogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google. They're having a bad day. They're writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you're standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who's obsessed now?

Read the whole thing - it's Danny's usual mix of humour and insight, and I've not attempted to capture his Foo reflections.

Danny puts his finger on something I've been struggling to articulate for a while. I think there are plenty of issues that boil down to the loss of the private register on the web. Jorgen's posting on 'Standards Bashing' today provides a great example. Dave Chappell has been fixing some reporting:

One of the topics Dave mentioned was some of his latest mis-quotes in a recent article, which he discussed in his O'Reilly Developers Weblog last week. Dave's a man of the world, so he knows mis-quotes happen all the time in the press, but I believe his comments in his weblog clearly express the point that this time around things are perhaps a little too far off-side.

I'd characterise what happened to Dave as a fault (intentional or otherwise) in the modulation of comments from private to public. But it also raised in my mind how the whole area of standards can be conducted on the web. I know from my current involvement with OMA and its struggles wih 'openness' that the register of the standards context is variously in the 'secret' or the 'private' and not until the work is complete can it really be considered 'public'. The challenge is that, with no realistic concept of 'private' on the web, there is an immediate conflict between openness and privacy. I can agree with both aims.

The process of creating standards has to be accessible to all affected parties, so there's a sense in which I am critical of the way IBM and Microsoft have attempted to 'stuff' the web services technology movement with work done 'secretly'. On the other hand, I understand the need for the privacy of the parties actually conducting the work and there's a sense in which I support their actions in keeping early work off the web, which has no respect for that which is neither 'secret' nor 'public'.

Maybe these two things are actually distinct - preserving privacy and being inclusive. Perhaps my unease over web services standardisation is because Tim O'Reilly has a perfect right to decide who he invites to his personal FOO Camp but no vendor has the right to decide which competitor may or may not participate meaningfully in creating a public standard. Setting the register and setting the agenda are two different things.

posted at 11:59 PM (UK) | |